


Lamentation

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: Eight Nights [8]
Category: Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Catharsis, F/M, Jewish Holidays, M/M, Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 03:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2836151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sometimes David thinks it melodramatic, to count Jack’s death in a string of calamities that fall on this day, as if the death of any man is so monumental to hold it up against the other things that have happened, the weary march of tragedies that have befallen the world of the night, or the eve, or the day after.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lamentation

Sometimes David thinks it melodramatic, to count Jack’s death in a string of calamities that fall on this day, as if the death of any man is so monumental to hold it up against the other things that have happened, the weary march of tragedies that have befallen the world of the night, or the eve, or the day after.

It is early in the morning and David wants to think it is not fair to count it there, but by afternoon he thinks that it is right. It is the day he lost half his soul. Is that not a calamity for the entire kingdom? How can a man rule with only half of his conscience?

But he finds it suits the role of kingship, to only have a piece of who he was. Silas laughs, darkly about it, and David thinks the greatest thing he does is not strike the former king for the pleasure of hearing him stop.

~~~~

This is how it happens.

There is gunfire, and Jack moves in front of David like he once moved in front of Silas, and the bullets strike him in the heart.

That is not how it happens at all.

~~~~

David does not let anyone say that the fighting is done until two days later. Ethan is the one who says he will carry the message, Ethan is the one who finally gets it out of David, angrily, with a punch and a shove and harsh words that David does not remember. The truth is that David does not remember much of what happens. He feels like he is in the mouth of an enormous beast, one that refuses to close his jaws.

He wonders if this is how Jack felt, that day, long ago, when David came back to Shiloh with Silas and a Goliath. He wonders if this is how Jack felt when his father pronounced that he could think of things worse than death. He cannot imagine living so long feeling this way, like there is nothing left but for the beast to close it’s jaws and spit him out.

No wonder Jack asked so often to be allowed to die. He sought relief from that sensation, that feeling of staring up into oblivion and knowing it was better than anything else the world could design for him.

But Jack was wrong, then.

David is not wrong, now.

~~~~

This is how it really happens.

Jack is standing between David and Silas, and Silas is lying, _lying_ , that Jack could have it back, that Jack could be his heir again if he only slides the knife into David’s side, instead of his father’s, that God can forgive him for trying to take the crown but there is no forgiveness of patricide, that even Esau’s brutishness and loutishness and sins were forgiven for his piety with his father. 

And in that indecision, Silas knifes his son in the liver, and Jack dies.

But that is not really how it happens.

~~~~

“I’m sorry,” Michelle says, over and over, when she hears of it, when she presses her hand over her mouth and cries. “I knew,” she whimpers, “I knew when he fell,” she clarifies, and David knows she is not lying. She knew. He doesn’t know why she’s sorry, though. She couldn’t possibly know that David betrayed her with her brother, she cannot possibly know the extent to which David strayed from her single-minded devotion. She broke her word with God to be with him. He did nothing but squander it.

But she holds him and he cries, and he thinks perhaps it doesn’t matter. Jack and Michelle, Yoni and Michal, Jonathan and Michelle Benjamin. Born minutes apart. Maybe she is the only one who would understand the irresistible pull of the Benjamin bloodline, how David would have never been able to do anything else but dumbly followed them wherever they led him. How it was not simply lust, but something deeper than that.

But he does not say any of it.

(In truth, when she finds out, and she does, she will feel like David is pulling her intestines out of her stomach through her heart, she will be unable to touch him or look at him or love him again, and perhaps that will be what strikes her barren, what curses her, is to be unable to love where her brother loved, once.

And she will think David cruel for it, but never think that perhaps the blame should lie on God, who would not let Jack die.)

“I couldn’t stop it,” he says, finally, and he apologizes again and again into her shoulder, and she holds him, her hair caught in his hands.

~~~~~  
This is how it happens.

It is one moment when Jack rushes into a fray, to give the rest of the men time to move, and his body is riddled with bullets, but by the time Silas’ men have looked up to see what happened, the rest of the men were upon them, and the battle won.

Of course, this is a lie.

~~~~

The truth is that David does not know how it happens. He was there, and he witnessed it, but he does not remember. Ethan knows, but refuses to say, refuses to speak on it, no matter how much David shakes him or commands him or threatens him. All he will say is “it’s better that you don’t remember how he died,” and then stubbornly refuses to speak anymore on the matter.

And slowly, that too becomes the habit. It makes the king angry and sullen, so no one talks about it. No one says, either, how there is something missing from how David rules.

David keeps his own counsel.

~~~~

“Can I make holidays?” he asks, on day, to Nathan, who is finally clean. Who knew there was a real person under all that grime, he thinks, and the truth is she’s very pretty once she’s dressed in real clothes and her hands aren’t black with scum. 

She comes down from the altar, then. “Do you mean religiously?” she asks, and he knows that they can have a coherent conversation, then, instead of the usual, which involves her looking somewhere over his head and just _speaking_. Not for the first time, David begins to grasp how hard it must be for her to converse with people, to focus on the words in the room.

He nods, and she sits in the pew next to him. “What would you have us celebrate?” she asks, clearly thinking this matter over in full.

“I want a day of mourning,” he explains, and her mouth opens in an oh, and she nods. “I want it to be on the day that we took the country.”

“You want it to be on the day Jack died,” she clarifies, and he feels all the pain of what those words mean, what it really, truly means, explode back into his bloodstream. It’s worse than being shot. 

So it takes him a moment to reply. “It’s not just the day that Jack-” he starts, and pauses, and starts again. “A lot of terrible things happened that day. I looked it up.”

“A lot of terrible things happen every day,” she replies. “Any day of the year is littered with death and expulsion and sorrow. Why is yours so special?”

_Why is yours so special_ , she asks, and David does not know how to answer it coherently, he’s so throttled with rage. He feels like his vision is clouding over with it, that there will never be anything clear again. _Why is yours so special_ , when everything crumbled that day. When everything was ripped from him in a fell swoop that he cannot even _remember_. “Because God chose me, because He asked me for all of this, and then he _took_ him, and this is what I want in return,” David says, knowing he sounds like a child. _Because I’m the king, because I’m the king, because I’m the king_ , is what rings in his head, but it is not in his own voice, it is in Silas’. 

“Will you write the prayers for it?” is her reply, “will you write the music and the words we should say to God?”

David had not thought of that. Where do these things come from, after all? But it seems like a small enough thing to do. “Will God help?”

She shrugs. “It’s a selfish thing you ask for. There is no way to know. But I will help,” she assures him. “There was a hole in Jack. It was leaking all the good of him away, consuming all the ill. You saved him.”

“He died.”

“But you gave him leave to,” Nathan says, “when you loved him. You gave him leave to die, without sorrow, without regret, without failure.”

David feels the horror well up in his mouth like a bad taste, suck the air from the room, and he tries to speak but all that comes out is a protesting groan. “No,” he finally manages. “No, that’s not-”

“You saved him,” Nathan affirms, before he can say anymore, “you saved him, from his selfishness, from his greed, from his ambition, from his pain. No one else. It was you.”

David presses his hands against his face, and shakes his head. “I didn’t do it so that he could _die_ ,” he finally says.

“No,” Nathan agrees. “But he made himself over for you. He worked his soul over for you. It was not his soul that knit to yours, seeking the good, it was yours that knit to his, knowing it was there.” She stops speaking clearly again, but for once, David understands what she says. “God hears your lamentations.”

David goes quiet, and finally, after a time, he nods. That’s what he will call it, he thinks, his holiday. Lamentations.

~~~~

He holds himself still, and gives himself that, the one day a year to cry over it, to think on it, to disrupt the world with his anger and his fear and the hole in his soul where Jack used to be, and it may not be enough, but it is the balm that soothes the ache until the next year passes.

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes:
> 
> A: thiiiis holiday is very roughly based on Tisha ba'v, which is basically the day that the Jews mourn all the terrible things that have happened to them over the centuries, but because it really remembers the destruction of the Temples, (the first of which was built by David's son, Solomon) this was something I had issues believing would be a thing in Gilboa. I have blabbered long enough on this. Look it up! It is a sad but interesting holiday.
> 
> B: Thank you, thank you, thank you, for sticking with me, if you did! I wrote these to sort of help me flesh out the world of Kings but I really loved being able to track this relationship through the holidays I imagined them celebrating.


End file.
